


The Sum of Our Parts

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Gen, hurt comfort, post framework
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 14:45:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11488575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: Theirs is a forever love, but after the trials of the last few weeks, Fitz and Simmons are forced to face the facts: that sometimes love is not enough, and each must find their feet before reaching for the other's hand.





	The Sum of Our Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Daisy helps FitzSimmons repair their relationship
> 
> for florchis and buckysbears, who both inspire me constantly

It was a miserable time on the SS Space Prison. Not the routine itself – that was not too bad, not too different from being on base, but for the grating knowledge that they were here against their wills. No, what was really getting down on everyone was the shadow of the Framework, still hanging over their lives. 

Coulson replayed Captain America’s speech to the Hub at the Fall of Shield; a call to action that the meek, obedient teacher in the Framework world had never heard, had never felt. He’d sent children to be brainwashed and killed. They were computer-coded children, and he a computer-coded version of himself, but still. It was a harrowing thought. 

Mack was haunted by memories of his daughter, in a grief that was different from his first grief in all the most painful ways. Having her back had always been a dream and though that should have helped him move on, instead it led him to question the nature of reality. It plunged his faith into doubt, and he felt more alone than he had in years. If Hope could exist in a godless world like that, and not here, what was the point of it all? 

Elena did not have the answers, and she knew it was more than just language and culture that kept her from understanding Mack now. But she stood by him, and did her best. Even so, she puzzled over her final decision in the Framework. To stay with Mack. To die with him. She had passed it off as a gamble she had been willing to take, but really, in hindsight, she had not been confident. She had been ready to die. It was true: everyone who loved her most had been in that room. Her family was dead and gone. Her closest friend had disowned her. She had nothing but Shield, and even they were distrustful – except Daisy, perhaps, but still Elena wondered. Would she ever find a place? 

Daisy herself, ever resilient, was the backbone of the team in this time of crisis. Having lost Trip, lost Lincoln again – having been hunted and beaten by her friends, by May and Fitz – she felt all her old wounds ripped open again. The only way to heal them, she found, was to try and patch up the people around her. She had never loved God like Mack did. She had never been a drone, or feared being one, like Coulson had. She couldn’t even understand how May had managed to come out of this so lost: though her decision not to save the girl had been reinforced, by seeing the horrors of the aftermath of the alternative, May could feel how lost and broken her team was, and could do nothing. 

But Daisy could.

And that’s why, one night, Jemma came knocking on her door. Frantically, heavily, incessantly, until Daisy hauled the flat of the door out of the way of her desperately rapping knuckles. 

“It’s Fitz,” Jemma gushed, in explanation. Daisy nodded in understanding, and pulled Jemma into her room. Jemma shoved a packet of Oreos into her arms, as some sort of payment for the disruption, and begged: “Can you go talk to him, see how he is?”

“I talk to him plenty,” Daisy assured her. “He’s going through some stuff, for sure, but he’ll be alright.” 

Jemma shook her head. That wasn’t good enough.

“I just. I want. To help. _So badly._ But I can’t be near him right now. I can’t. Not after -” 

“I know.” Daisy swallowed the knot in her throat. “Fitz knows too, okay?” 

“And he’s beating himself up about it, isn’t he?” 

“In fairness, he’s beating himself up about a lot these days,” Daisy pointed out, and hoped she didn’t sound as cryptic as she thought she did. Last week, Fitz had been hit by a depression so deep and so bleak that believing he deserved to breathe had barely been in the picture, but Daisy wasn’t about to tell Jemma that. The last thing Fitz needed was Jemma in overdrive, and the last thing Jemma needed was to fear that the man she loved, but couldn’t look at, was about to off himself in her absence.

“I want to fix him,” Jemma insisted. “It. The situation. I just wish I knew what to do to make it better.” 

“You know that’s not your job, right?” Daisy checked. “To fix him?” 

Jemma sighed. 

“I know,” she promised. Tears pricked at her eyes, and tugged at her voice. “But I love him, and he’s hurting, and it’s hard.”

“I know,” Daisy agreed. She wrapped her arms around Jemma, and together, the two of them took a big, deep breath. A little reluctantly, Daisy pulled away. 

“You want to know what I think?” she offered. “I think you need to stop trying to solve the problem for him.” 

Jemma blinked, surprised and a little hurt. Those words sounded brutal, coming from Daisy, who was such a friend to them both. But Daisy continued: 

“Firstly, you don’t see the world like he does, and maybe he doesn’t need what you think he needs. 

“Secondly, you have your own stuff to deal with. I know you want to help Fitz and I know you know he’s not the same person as the one in there, but I think you should take a beat. Your heart doesn’t always know what your brain knows. You had to kill a man who loved you, and who looked like Fitz. A robot man, but still. He tried to kill you – and then, inside the Framework? Another man with Fitz’s face looked you in the eyes, and shot you. Actually shot you!”

“Stop it,” Jemma hissed, clenching her fists. Hot tears dripped down her face. Daisy pulled back a little. 

“I’m just saying,” she explained more carefully. “Solving other people’s problems isn’t going to get you out of this one. And acting like everything is the same as it was two weeks ago is going to destroy you both. It’s nobody’s fault, but it still sucks ass, and it’s still going to take time to get over. I think you should take this time as an opportunity to process what’s been going on with _you._ Don’t worry about your relationship. It’s still there. It wants to be there. It’s not going anywhere. But it’s not going to move forward, either, unless you trust that Fitz can get back onto his own two feet without you. He has done before.” 

It was a hard reality to face, but Jemma could not deny the truth of Daisy’s words. All she wanted to do was curl up in safety, but there was nowhere safe, and she was in no condition to offer the help she wanted to, and sometimes… sometimes she wasn’t what Fitz needed. Just as he – as much as it hurt them both – was not what Jemma needed right now. 

She took a deep breath. Tears fell freely down her cheeks now, and Daisy was tearing up too, bleeding empathy. 

“I just want everything to be okay,” Jemma begged. 

“Me too.” Daisy hugged her again, briefly, and then held her at arms length to meet her eyes. “And yes, I will keep an eye on Fitz, and help him if I can. I promise. In fact, I’ll go see him right now. Sounds good?” 

Jemma nodded absently, distracted in thought and wiping at her eyes with her hands until Daisy passed her a tissue. 

“I’ll go… book a treadmill,” she decided. Daisy looked at her, puzzled, and she explained: “Regular exercise has meditative qualities, and can help with emotional regulation as well as sleep and circulation. Amongst other things, of course.” 

She smiled briefly, and Daisy smiled, more encouragingly, back. 

“That’s my girl,” she praised.

\--

When Daisy knocked on Fitz’s door, he called her in. He was in bed, with a sketchpad on his lap, removing a set of earphones from his ears as she pushed the door open. Immediately, her eyes were drawn to the pictures all around the walls. There were strings and pegs up, decorated by pages he’d torn out of other books, and drawn all over in pen and pencil and apparently, charcoal. Some of the images were quite horrific, and almost made Daisy flinch: faces in agony, dead trees, hellish landscapes. Others were not so bad. A woman on a hill, silhouetted in moonlight. A candle, burning brightly in the darkness. A butterfly, drawn in black charcoal and decorated with bright blue and red ballpoint pens. 

“You’ve been busy,” Daisy remarked. Fitz looked around, unsure how proud he should be of these scribblings, born from nightmares. 

“It relaxes me,” he explained.

“That’s good.” 

Daisy nodded, and perused the pictures some more, but she no longer paid so much attention to the details. Her mind churned over Jemma’s concern, and how to raise the subject with Fitz. In the end, she decided, she couldn’t be much more brutal than he was being with himself, so she forged ahead.

“Jemma’s worried about you.” 

Fitz lowered his eyes. “I know.” 

“She’s sorry she can’t see you.”

“That’s not her fault. It’s…” 

“Complicated,” Daisy finished for him. “But she wanted to make sure you knew. She still loves you, you know. Like, really a lot." 

“I still love her too.” 

Fitz’s eyes burned with tears. His heart had been yearning for Jemma for so long, it had become a dull and pounding ache now that they were apart… but not really apart. Not separate. Just separated. It was always a struggle to remind himself of that, especially on the bad days.

“Do you want to send her a message?” Daisy offered. “Write her a letter. I’ll deliver it, if you like.” 

Fitz shook his head.

“I’m not… ready,” he explained. His voice trembled a little. It was hard, not to reach out to Jemma with everything he had. But in spite of how beaten down he felt, and how he could hardly believe she would still hold this olive branch out to him, something inside told him not to do it. Something on the page in front of him, told him not to do it. 

“Not ready… how?” Daisy wondered.

“Not ready to… be Jemma’s. Without being myself first. I thought I knew who I was but now I don’t anymore. I don’t know if I’m a good person. I don’t know who I’d really be without Jemma. Until I know that, I won’t be able to prove to myself that the Framework wasn’t a real potential outcome. That it really wasn’t me. And until I can prove that, I won’t be ready.” 

Daisy pressed her lips together, and swallowed hard. Her stomach turned.

“Does this mean you’re gonna go run off and find yourself in the wild?” 

Fitz laughed, a short and breathless dismissal. 

“No! I don’t want to leave you guys… I sure as hell don’t want to break up with Jemma. I just want to be sure that, by the time we can be together again, I can be my best self. Does that… make sense?”

“Not really,” Daisy confessed. “But if it did, I think I’d be concerned.”  
  
Fitz snorted.

“Can I at least tell her you’re alright?” Daisy pressed. 

“Sure.” He wasn’t, really. Not every day. But he was going to be.

Sensing the gravity in his words, Daisy nodded. They lived messy lives, but here they were, making the best sense out of it that they could. She dropped down on the bed, scooching in beside him, and sighed. 

“So, what’s the plan?” she asked him. “How are you going to figure out that you’re a good person?” 

“Well, I don’t know,” Fitz replied. “A lot of thinking, I s’pose. And overthinking. It’s going to take a while which… well, sucks.” 

Daisy nodded in sympathy. “Welcome to the human race, I guess. And the Inhuman race. Existential crises are another thing we share, apparently.” 

“Oh, good, so you’re not too evolved to look at my bugs?” 

Daisy screwed up her nose. “Are they real bugs?”

“No. Pictures of bugs.” 

“Are they like… eating people, or something?” 

“No!” Fitz gagged. “They’re just really geometric to draw. I thought I’d try my hand at something a bit less…” 

He gestured around the room. Scribbles born from nightmares. Even the nice ones, Daisy saw, were rushed and urgent and painfully soul-bearing. Still, they held promise; the promise that Fitz could still produce something beautiful, and if he couldn’t do that by building, maybe this was a better way.

“Okay,” Daisy agreed. “Shoot.” 

\-- 

Daisy couldn’t help but be proud of them, as much as it hurt, as she watched them struggle toward the light on their own. In fits and starts, they made their way toward progress. Jemma started exercising, sleeping and eating better, and meditating with May each morning. She was less inclined to panic attacks and catastrophic spirals, and gradually she was getting her PTSD back under control. Fitz, meanwhile, started talking to Mack at length about philosophy, and as he stumbled through hundreds of years of humanity's existential crisis he began to find he no longer felt so lost. His art evolved, too, and he developed two separate notebooks: one for the nightmares, and one for his more deliberate art. He drew flowers, and beautiful beetles. Scarabs were his favourite. Sometimes, he drew people, or even scenes, like the one of an old couple walking a dog. One night, Daisy found him by the big viewing window, trying to draw a picture of space, like the one he’d had in his bunk since the Bus days, and even before that. Apparently, he’d bought it from a goodwill store back home, and carried it around with him all this time. It wasn’t here, prisoner with him, but it was reassuring to know that he was finding roots of what he loved before Jemma, outside of her.

Plus, Daisy couldn’t lie, it made her intensely happy that this love – their love of space – was so much older than their love for each other and yet, it was something they shared. 

 _(The cosmos says what?_ Daisy almost teased.)

Then one morning she was eating alone at a table in the cafeteria, watching Jemma and Fitz across the room, each one table apart. Now that they were both on steady ground, Daisy wondered if she shouldn’t reprise her matchmaker role; no doubt both were hesitant to make the first move with so much at stake. But then, before her very eyes, Fitz got up and walked to Jemma’s table. He held out a sheet of paper. 

It was a page from his notebook. A bird, based on a bluejay, and beautifully detailed as if in flight.

“I… made this for you,” he offered. Jemma’s eyes flicked over his face, still not sure if she was ready to meet his eyes, but she took the paper and studied his drawing and sighed in admiration.

“It’s beautiful,” she praised. 

“Thank you,” he said. It wasn’t as hard to swallow the compliment as he remembered. “I’ve been working on my art lately. Helps me think.” 

“That’s really nice,” Jemma agreed. “I’ve started meditating with May. Though I’ve missed having you at morning tea.” 

“Me too.”

And then Jemma took a deep breath. She looked up, and met Fitz’s eyes. They were a little heavier, more burdened than she remembered, but just as rich and soulful and loving as the eyes that she remembered. That she herself loved. 

“Fitz, I – I mean, would you – “ She pressed her lips together for a moment. “Would you like to sit down?” 

“Jemma,” he breathed. “I would love to.” 

And he did. 


End file.
